Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, the seventh of fourteen children of Jean-Baptiste and Cathérine Fatio in Basel, Switzerland, had moved with his family in 1672 to Duillier.
Fatio, at the age of eighteen, had traveled to Paris in 1682 to perform astronomical studies under the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini at the Parisian observatory.
His greatest scientific success is the explanation of the nature of the zodiacal light in 1684, which he attributed to particles reflecting the light of the sun.
Fatio had in 1686 by chance become a witness to a conspiracy aimed at William of Orange, which he helped to foil.
In the same year he had made the acquaintance of Jacob Bernoulli and Christiaan Huygens, with whom he developed a particularly close cooperation.
The main contents of their work were the calculus.
He had traveled to London in 1687 and made the acquaintance of John Wallis and Edward Bernard (1638-1697) and worked out a solution of the inverse tangent problem.
He is also connected by friendship to Gilbert Burnet, John Locke, Richard Hampden and his son John Hampden.
Becoming a fellow of the Royal Society in 1688 on the recommendation of founding member Sir John Hoskyns, he gives an account on the mechanical explanation of gravitation of Huygens before the Society, whereby he tries to connect Huygens' theory with that of Newton.
